Yoob vs Cartesia: a Cartesia alternative
Realtime text to speech for voice agents, with emotion, laughs and sighs you write into the text, at a fraction of Cartesia's per-character rate.
Price, at published list rates
| Yoob | Cartesia | |
|---|---|---|
| Text to speech | $0.01 (Fast) or $0.02 (Best) per 1K characters | $0.037 to $0.065 per 1K characters, by plan and overage |
| Speech to text | $0.055 an hour for files, $0.10 an hour live | $0.39 to $0.54 an hour, by plan |
Cartesia rates from cartesia.ai/pricing, read 1 November 2026. Yoob rates from yoob.com/pricing. Prices exclude tax; volume and enterprise discounts on either side are not shown. Spotted an outdated number? Tell us and we fix it.
What you get with Yoob
- Emotion, sound and delivery tags written into the text:
[tender],[sigh],[laughing], 17 feelings and 16 sounds. - 493 voices in 24 accents, 48 kHz audio, streamed over HTTP or a WebSocket that takes text as your model writes it.
- Transcripts that carry emotion, sounds and delivery, word timings, a voice profile and a human-or-AI score.
- OpenAI-compatible
/v1/audio/speechand/v1/audio/transcriptions: switch with a base URL. - One key and one balance for speech, transcription, voice agents, AI-voice detection and avatars.
- A Free plan every month: 5 minutes of speech and 10 minutes of transcription.
Where Cartesia is stronger
- More languages for speech.
- Fixed monthly character bundles, if you prefer a bundle to a balance.
Switching takes two lines
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://tts-api.yoob.com/v1", api_key=YOOB_API_KEY)
audio = client.audio.speech.create(
model="yoob-tts-1", voice="w1243",
input="[excited] Okay, do not freak out. [gasp] They want me to start on Monday!")
audio.write_to_file("line.wav")Get a free API key Read the docs
More comparisons: Yoob vs ElevenLabs · Yoob vs Deepgram · Yoob vs AssemblyAI · Yoob vs OpenAI